An efficient Reed–Solomon redundant arrays of independent disks 6 (RS-RAID 6) exclusive OR (XOR) accelerator with a scaling scheme is proposed in this paper. The accelerator first considers the hardware working characteristic to reduce the complexity of codec computation. To increase efficiency, the parameter calculation of the 8-bit Galois field [GF(8)] is converted to a GF(2) calculation, where two additions, one multiplication, and one division are optimized in every 8 bits of calculation. A new scaling scheme is also proposed to guarantee the input/output (I/O) balance. The proposed Reed–Solomon (RS) codec hardware architecture is fully verified at the Real Time Logistics (RTL) level and synthesized with a GF 12 nm technology library to compare the gate cost and input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance with those of other classic solutions. Separate simulations are performed for different codec algorithms and scaling schemes. The IOPS performance of the proposed RS-RAID 6 XOR accelerator is improved by a factor of 2–3 at the cost of 47% more gates.